The Shadow of Him
by Bitumz
Summary: He mirrored her darkness and she reflected his past. Where Karen Page chose to go, Frank Castle would have to follow. Kastle.
1. Her Darkness

_**A/N:**_ Can we talk about the screaming chemistry between Frank and Karen for a moment? Because I am done for. Every single detail, be it his face when he looks at her or the way she bends over backward to defend his name, hooked me in line and sinker and the rest is history. That being said, this story will be my take on season 2 and the aftermath that follows in its wake. Enjoy!

* * *

 _ **Hell is empty**_  
 _ **and all the devils are here**_

~William Shakespeare~

Fear was a familiar thing now, pulsing quick beneath her skin. There was a time when she would have had no choice but to let it consume her. Freeze her mind, motions, and every instinct that fought to keep her calm, quiet – alive.

But that was long before she had moved to New York.

Now the sensation that rose the hairs at the back of her neck could only mean one thing.

The sound of her seat belt clicking securely around her just barely cut through the blaring Earth Wind and Fire song with an almost humorous irony to it, but before she let herself think too much, she shut the music off mechanically at the Colonel's sharp command, and focused instead on the road passing steadily beneath the wheels. She breathed and breathed, knuckles just beginning to turn white around the steering wheel when the thought struck her.

To everyone else she must seem batshit crazy – it was dangerously close to common knowledge that where Karen Page chose to go, danger usually followed – but if it meant bringing to light another piece of the puzzle, she'd throw caution to the wind and chase her calling.

This time she half-hoped it would ring true.

The barrel of the Smith and Wesson twitching just an inch from her temple briefly won the fight for her attention, bringing with it lucid memories of the ever-growing list of times she'd had the misfortune of staring one down.

There was the abandoned warehouse – a sudden, unexpected flip of circumstances driven by fear and sheer adrenaline, leaving scarlet stains of red blossoming along a crisp, white undershirt – a sight that she never really could erase from her skin, nor the worst of her nightmares.

Then there had been the star of them. Fisk. Each night there for a while, silently waiting for her in the darkest corners of her conscious, reaping his revenge in any number of imaginative ways depending on how much she had to drink that night. After too long though, the darkness had become something she had learned to easily navigate, leaving him no places left to hide. Leaving only a lifeless man in a cold metal chair instead, red on white.

Until only weeks ago, fresh on the front her mind like the permanent stain of black ink, there had been the hospital hallway.

By no means had Grotto been a saintly man – she clung diligently onto her compassion in a place that saw it as insanity, sure, but she was far from stupid. This man had been a career criminal for far longer than she'd even held the understanding of what exactly that meant… but he was their client, too and had come to them begging for help. So she put on her best New Yorker act and pledged her undying love for her injured 'husband'. Lied right to the administrators' and nurses' faces and not a single one noticed. It was infuriating and exhilarating and liberating all at once.

At that moment, she thought she knew exactly why it was that the Devil of Hell's Kitchen put on the mask every night and took the burdens of the city onto his own shoulders. Why he hid his face from the stifling grasp of the streets and the eyes of the people he protected.

Because it was all for show. A symbol. Meant to make the public believe that criminals quaked in fear at the thought of carrying out crime in even the dimmest lit back-allies. To make people feel safe in their own homes.

To lie.

There were no heroes in Hell's Kitchen.

The faintest sound of struggle had whispered through the walls of the hospital room and every synapse along her skin spit flame. She'd grabbed up Grotto without second thought and towed him toward the hallway.

The first shot rang out from behind them, exploding through the tight space and shuddering her to the core. Another followed almost instantly. Nurses and patrons screamed, calls for security were fired off, and her heart hammered loud in her ears– but she only truly heard the sound of heavy, booted footsteps reverberating off the walls behind them.

Karen's hand found the back of Grotto's left arm, towing him toward her mid-sprint, just in time for the third and fourth shots to splinter the wall where his back would have been. She turned to push him around the corner toward the fire exit before her and risked a glance back.

Wide eyes found exactly what they had expected to – the lone, terrifying man, once mistaken for an army – a figure in all black from jacket to boots, so broad that his shadow in the remaining fluorescents splayed across the tiled floor, nearly bridging the distance between them. Her focus lowered to the matching shotgun he held at his chest – black as night, pointed directly at her – she watched him just long enough to see a large hand jerk the grip back and prepare another shot.

Karen turned the corner and bolted, pushing against the top of Grotto's back when she caught up to him at the top of the stairs, running right off his heels. Her upper body tensed, expecting the excruciating pain of hot steel to tear through her at any moment in a haphazard attempt to reach its target.

But it never came.

That had been her first clue.

* * *

It was the driving force behind her decision to join 'team Matt' when it came to the alarming idea of representing Frank Castle in court.

He had killed people in cold blood, deserved every second that he would be sitting in jail for it, but the huge man strapped down in that hospital bed was not the monster that everyone labeled him to be. Monsters didn't care about anything – not their families, their memories, and definitely not about innocent life. But he – Frank, had asked to speak with her and her alone. Asked her to stay, _please_ , and help him remember. Looked her in the eye and swore she was never in any danger – not with him. But it was only afterwards, when he spoke of his family – his lips curving up with the ghosts of wounded smiles as he shared with her the bittersweet memories of their time together - that she believed him. Every word.

He was alone. Having to relive his worst nightmare day-in and day-out without any form of redemption or resolution, apart from that he found in the trigger of a gun. He was a war hero without a war, so he brought one with him wherever he went. And, like each of the resulting casualties along the way, he did not deserve to die for his sins.

Karen handed him the picture of his family, bringing a look to his eyes that left her feeling every bit like the criminal she was for breaking into his home and forcing herself into the most private parts of his life. He would only glance at it every so often while he spoke with her, as if taking the time to focus on each of their faces would lead him to their fate.

The man himself was not cold blooded. Not so much as they believed. And if his methods labeled him a monster in their eyes, what would that make her?

* * *

That night would be the first of many that brought her no inkling of rest. Instead, she would spend the entirety of it with a pot of coffee and yellowing news prints, digging until she pieced together the puzzle that was the truth. Anything to keep him from getting the death penalty that Reyes was so viciously pushing for her own personal gain.

If Matt noticed the next morning at the office, she was thankful he had chosen this specific occasion not to ask – but she knew well before he pulled her off to the side to insist that she didn't have to face Frank alone again if she didn't want to that feigning PTSD was not going to work. It was clear the man was _not_ crazy, and was certainly not suffering from anything caused by the hardships of a faraway war.

And she was not afraid of Frank Castle. Not anymore.

So she went to him again, spending nearly half an hour being searched from head to toe. Fingers rifled through every one of her files. Paperclips were discarded. And she was uniformly regarded by each set of eyes on her as if she were just shy of senseless.

He watched her enter the interrogation room with a permanent glower on his beat up face, acknowledging her with a quiet "ma'am" and hawk-like eyes. The cool, solid chair was a pleasant contradiction against her back as she sat down across from him and held his gaze, the challenge of it alone exhilarating in its own right. Chains at his wrist jingled in the silence as he rested his hands for her to see on the table between them.

Something changed when his eyes flickered down to the faint shadows beneath hers.

"You found somethin'."

Her hands suddenly itched to fuss with her face. It wasn't fair. Where she had to fight for leads and dig through the dirt to find the facts she sought out, he only needed his sight.

Instead, she cleared her throat and tried her spiel. Nearly an hour's worth of convincing had been organized and filed within the sections of her small briefcase, but just as she'd suspected, he would hear nothing of it. Frank's interest lied only in one matter. He was at war with his past just as much as he was with those he punished, and she was certain it could be the only thing that saved him. Her temper had always been a fiery thing, but him failing to see so for himself was the kindle.

Karen threw a hand out in frustration. "All of them – they all think that you're a monster… But I know that you're not." A look of disbelief and something softer passed through his bruised eyes. "You're _not_."

His brow twitched. "You sure about that?" He asked, infuriatingly calm.

Karen shoved back blonde locks from her neck and sighed. She wanted to be, but to prove it they would both need more time.

* * *

The idea of calling Frank to the witness stand at his own trial was one that sat uneasy in her gut. He would have to tell his tragic story out loud to every stranger in attendance, and though she knew it was the only way for the real truth to be told, something about the idea of it beckoned to a more primal side of her that she had not known existed until he entered the room, garnered in a tieless suit and chains.

She instantly regretted asking him to do it. They did not deserve to hear his reasons with the way they berated him, stoning him with vulgar signs and slurs as he walked the gauntlet that was the main hall of the courtroom. He showed no signs of their effect on him and Karen could only wonder how with the way they scalded her.

If she was honest with herself, something deep within her unwillingly blamed Matt while she watched him push and prod with his questioning, until finally all of her hard work and sleepless nights were flushed down the drain. The sleeping beast was poked once too many times and woke up to tame his masters.

 _I want you to know that I'd do it all again…_

Frank had looked right at her for the smallest of seconds, right into her face, enough for her to catch the terrifying shift in his expression.

 _I know what I did. I know who I am. And I do not need your help!_

She clasped her hands hard over her mouth as he morphed into the monster everyone wanted him to be, roaring deep curses through the courtroom, man after man piling on to restrain him.

* * *

The worst of it had to be over.

She liked to think of herself as a strong woman molded by a past laced in venom, and both the financial district and the laws of the land in one of the most ferocious cities in the world. There was also staring death in the face on three... four? separate occasions, and surviving to relive their darkness in her downtime.

But this was something else entirely. This was a lie accepted as the truth and she could no longer be a part of it. It was a convincing show, sure, but that man on the witness stand was merely playing an assigned role. Doing what he was told. Following orders. Only to be confirmed when a mere two days later, they released the name of the cell block he had escaped from. The same one that housed Wilson Fisk.

Before the city even had a chance to brace for the impact, the attacks started again.

Karen could admit to not liking Reyes in the least. In fact, after what she'd just learned about her involvement in the deaths of Frank's family, her feelings very closely edged disgust, but when she peered up at her lifeless body hunched over her desk in a pool of her own blood, murdered right before her eyes, she could only think of the woman's daughter and the lifetime of pain that would come with her death. It was the kind that drove good people to do bad things.

Matt's weight lifted off of her and immediately she tore herself away from the thought and instead tended to the muffled moans of pain coming from Foggy. He had luckily not been hit in a critical spot, but it was enough to let her know that they were just as much a target as anyone else on his list.

She had gotten too close. Lost all objective. Knew too much. The offer of police protection was one she would put up a fight against Ellison about, but only due to the small voice that cried out guiltily at the back of her mind, warning her that it could only mean two more innocent lives getting caught in the crossfire.

Frank had made a point once to mention his precision in an attempt to make her feel safe. _One shot, one kill_.

If he wanted her dead, she would die. It was that simple.

So she waved out the brave pair of New York's finest with a halfhearted retort and rushed to her bed to grab the files, filled from cover to cover with the names of other people that could potentially be sitting in a very similar, terrifying position as her. But she doubted it. Some things just still didn't quite add up. The skull photo found in Reyes' daughter's backpack, unjustifiable targets – Foggy surviving the hit... Not exactly the Punisher's MO.

As she gathered her things, the calling-card sound of a struggle came from just beyond her door, beginning and ending in the span of three quick rasps of her heart.

Her purse was quickly discarded onto the bed before she knelt down, slid open her middle dresser drawer, and pulled out the loaded .380 that rested inside.

The cool metal of the grip had just begun to match the temperature of her skin when she drew it up in front of her.

Karen's lip curled coldly when she saw him, his frame filling the span of her doorway and closing off her only escape. Icy fear curled up each inch of her spine and hummed in the back of her skull. He moved with slow paces across the threshold, arms held out to either side of him submissively, empty palms open in the air. He softly shushed her, the sound barely coming in over the beat of her heart in her ears and doing nothing to slow it.

"Hands on your head Frank," she hissed through her teeth, fingers slick around the gun aimed square at his chest. Her thumb cocked the hammer back "I mean it…"

"It wasn't me," he drawled quietly, and she wanted so badly to believe him – to lower her weapon and uncover the real story – because right now this one felt anything but right.

The feeling refused to release its hold on her trigger finger until the gun was knocked from her grip and a huge mass hovered over her, warming the air with the scents of coffee grounds and gunpowder, and shielding every inch of her comparably small frame from rogue shrapnel. Shock locked her muscles and blurred her eyes. She felt the press of rough hands against her head, his instincts surpassing her own at protecting the most vital part of her from shards of piercing hail.

The shots only went on for a few seconds, but it could have been years before the air finally stilled around them and the weight of him let up off her just enough for her to greedily draw a breath into tight lungs.

"Jesus Christ…" she exhaled, turning her face up, finding his hovering inches above. Wild eyes surveyed the space around them.

"Believe me now?" He asked, distracted. "We gotta' get out of here. Stay low."

Only when he lifted himself to his knee, still using his own body to shield her from the view of the windows, did she allow the confirmation of the truth she'd always known was there to settle her chest.

* * *

"Get in," he said over his shoulder, motioning toward the passenger door of her car as he moved quickly around to the driver side, somehow producing the keys from his pants pocket.

Karen's fingertips brushed against the handle and she faltered, looking over the car at him at the same time the electric doors unlocked in unison. She flinched at the sound and glanced behind her.

"We need to talk somewhere safe." He swung his door open, fingers tight around the frame. Something about his sense of urgency caught her off guard and choked a cynical retort in her throat. Days ago, she had been the one to try and get Grotto 'somewhere safe', and that was as far away from the man before her as possible. His eyes met hers when she didn't move. "Please, ma'am." Impatience tightened his voice.

Trapped between him and the unnameable threat that followed close behind, she ignored her better judgment and slid into the seat.

"Buckle up," he said, shifting the car into drive, and with that they were tearing through the city like hell on wheels.

Karen watched the buildings blur by, numb to the reckless speed they were traveling – to everything aside from the haunting new question that berated her mind like Josie's scotch.

"If that wasn't you… then who was it?" She asked aloud, more to the air than Frank.

"I don't know," he confessed, the words holding a certain strain of guilt that felt misplaced in her ears. He pressed the pedal down a little harder. "Not yet."

Karen turned to look at him, a bleak expression tugging at her features.

"We have to go to the police with this – they're on a man-hunt for the wrong man while whoever this is has free reign on the city… If they find out I'm still alive, they're going to try again," she ran her hand across her face, fiercely swiping at tears before they could fall free. The other frantically searched in her coat pocket for her cell phone "I – I have to call Foggy."

"Wait a second," Frank's hand moved toward her wrist and she jerked away, the harsh reflex to his action undeserved but ingrained within her just the same. He stilled, letting it linger passively in the air between them. His eyes flicked between her and the road. "Okay, just breathe for a second, okay… Just breathe." He repeated, and something about the way the words rolled on his voice helped more than it should have.

Only then did he return his hand back to the wheel.

"Listen to me," he started as he pulled smoothly into a parallel spot, right in front of the police station as if the entire force wasn't out for his blood. He met her eyes. "You go in there and get all the help you need, but I can't be involved… not yet."

"But Frank…" she began.

"No." he paused, nostrils flaring. "No. You were right. Whoever did this… whoever found you will do so again way before the cops can figure out who's pullin' the trigger, and I can't have them getting in my way."

Her brow furrowed over eyes that grew more mystified by his every word.

"In your way? You expect me to lie to the police so you can pick up where this maniac left off?" Her arms locked defiantly in her lap. "I'm not a part of your legal team anymore Frank. I have no laws to protect me from this. If I go in there and give them a false story, that's perjury. A felony. _Jail time_ ," she pressed. "I'm being hunted out here in broad daylight. Can you imagine what would happen to me in prison?"

Frank's face went unreadable.

After a moment, his head bobbed forward three times in quick nods, a single long finger restless against the steering wheel. "Okay – Okay look, just give me a chance to find some information. After that, it's all yours to do whatever you want with. Tell the cops everything, write your story, whatever you want," all at once, russet eyes drove into her like rain onto the earth and she internally fought back against the drowning sensation. Had she even mentioned her story to him? "I just need some more time."

This wasn't right and she knew it. She was playing right into his hand. What would Matt and Foggy think if they found out that she was harboring a fugitive? More specifically, one that had put all of their lives in danger.

But now, she had to take into account that he had saved hers once too.

She exhaled through her nose.

" _Dammit_. Fine. But I get to go with you." Frank's jaw ticked but she continued, unfazed. "They're going to stow me in some hotel somewhere, thinking I'm safe and hidden away but I've seen firsthand that it's a pretty flawed system."

For a long while he just looked at her, his head dipping every so often as he considered her tactics and mended his own. His eyes thinned before he finally nodded again.

"I'll be waiting below."

It wasn't _really_ lying, she kept telling herself, just an incorrect version of the truth – a mantra that got her in and out of the police station and into a protected hotel within the span of an hour. Matt had been the only thing to slow her down with his preaching and protecting, but as always it had come far too late.

 _Call for us if you need anything_ , the officers had said as they made their way down the elevator to give her some privacy.

 _I will_ , she lied to them through her teeth and the thin crack of the door, and it finally hit her how deep in shit she currently found herself.

How did she know he would even be down there waiting? Why did she want him to be? If she truly believed herself sane at that moment, feeling safer with a convicted mass murderer than the police seemed like the indefinite tipping point. She argued its merit with herself as she crept her way through the corridors, passed the heavy exit door, and down the narrow stairway that led to the underground parking garage.

A quick one-over of the space and there was her car, parked square in the middle of the lot. An old, familiar tune blared from the inside.

 _You're a shining star_  
 _no matter who you are_  
 _shining bright to see_  
 _what you could truly be_

Karen quickly got in and shut the door.

"Seriously? You know there're cops all over, right?"

The corners of his swollen lips lifted, the same way they would each time he'd divulge a long lost memory.

"Catchy tune huh? I used to sing along to stuff like this. Imagine me doing that?"

Scary thing was, she kind of could. This man had been someone else entirely before, and this was exactly the side of him that she'd tried so hard to convince everyone else was there. Of course his mannerisms and… habits had changed drastically. If anything, it showed that he was human. Broken.

Relatable, even.

She promptly ejected the tape and and tucked it away safely away in the glove compartment, opting to look out her window instead of at him when his voice, heavy like gravel, called for her attention. Her eyes found her reflection in the glass and she did what she could to steel herself against her second thoughts before she faced him.

* * *

Nothing could have prepared her for the sounds that came from the dining room. Every time a bone snapped, glass sliced flesh, blood gurgled, – it seemed to make a point of echoing loudly off the thick metal shelving she hid within, over and over again in her ears like a fever dream that there was no waking up from.

Such a frighteningly different man this was than the one she'd shared a conversation with just minutes before. He had looked straight into her eyes and somehow knew more about her than the friends she'd worked side by side with everyday for over a year. Solved her like a riddle. It was unsettling at first, as he inquired about her history with guns, but she could only label it as innocence when he dropped his eyes to the side and asked her why she hadn't taken a shot at him back there in her apartment.

Because there was a part of her that believed in him – always had.

Frank had never given her a reason to doubt him, and from the outside she was sure that sounded absurd, especially right then as buckshot tore the small diner to pieces, but no one else had been there in that hospital room... the interrogation room, her apartment; each time a new side of him coming to light that she knew had been there long before the world he lived in fell to ruin, dragging the real Frank Castle down with it – the one who saw straight through her bullshit and called her on every one of her jumbled emotions, his own eyes ablaze with them, only to leave the mess worse for the wear.

This, though, was something she could not handle. Being stalked and hunted down like a wild animal was one thing. Being used as the bait to draw them out made her sicker than she had believed she could ever feel – until she slowly uncurled herself from the kitchen appliances after the last deafening gunshot, and peaked over the doorway to survey the damage.

The iron smell of blood hung heavy in the air, its lesser source dripping thick from Frank's lips, down his chin and white shirt, and from his fingers like scarlet rain falling lazily over the pair of disfigured men at his feet. Karen's hand shot up to hide her gasp. The sight reminded her more of the climax in an old horror movie than anything she could possibly be witnessing in real life, and she was left to guess how many times he had been the star.

His name slipped passed her lips without fully meaning for it to, pulling his shadowed gaze in her direction. He refused to meet her eyes and she was almost thankful, for fear that the blackness of them at that moment would swallow her whole.

"You call the police, get protective custody… Get away from this thing. Get away from me," he murmured, breath hitching on blood as he fought to clear it from his mouth. "Just stay away from me."

Karen watched him leave, a part of her wondering whether his warning was more for her own good or for his - or those who chose to pursue her.

* * *

That night, she told the police everything, coming clean about the apartment shooting, the diner, where he was going to be next, everything – unloading the truth so wholly from her shoulders that for the first time in months, she truly felt like she deserved to hold her head high over them again.

There was barely enough time to enjoy the feeling before the call came in, resounding in unison from the police radios that surrounded her.

 _All units, explosion, 41st at the pier. Proceed with extreme caution._

Sergeant Mahoney stood from his side of the desk, a knowing look lifting his brow.

"I'm going with you." Karen confirmed as she pulled her jacket from the back of her chair and followed him from the room.

Something about the scene wasn't right. Burned bodies dotted the pier, some full of bullet holes, others only partially scalded, and a few that were being pulled in parts from the water below. The scenario had Punisher written all over it – but it had been the ship that was on fire, the smoke billowing high as firefighters finished off the final burning piles of ember – not the pier, leaving it only possible that they had never been on it. They'd known he was coming and ambushed him.

"Look, I know what you're thinking. Maybe Castle survived, maybe he's still out there... He ain't." Mahoney tried to comfort her as Karen ran her eyes over each of the charred faces she could still see before they were tucked away into their body bags.

"How can you be sure?" She asked, pulling the blanket draped over her shoulders closed a little tighter around the unwarranted knot in her chest. She swallowed. "Y-you ID him yet?"

"Twenty burned bodies," Mahoney rocked on his heels. "It takes time."

"So there's a chance?" Her eyes pinned him.

Karen was sure he tried to convince her otherwise, but she hadn't heard most of it.

* * *

"Coulda been smart. Coulda let the story go down with that boat. The _real_ Castle," he mocked. "Like you cared about him."

 _I did_ her mind screamed, not for the first time, all the while begging her to resist the urge to ignore the gun in her face, turn toward her passenger, and smack the infuriating sneer from his mouth.

If she were one to label, this is what a monster would truly look like. A decorated colonel, turned innocent-killing drug smuggler. A pathological liar that looked both judge and jury in the face, spewing endless adoration for the man whose family he'd had murdered and put a hit on to tie up loose ends.

The only person in the world who would speak for the _true_ Frank Castle.

Sickness curled in her gut.

The truth – it had gotten her many places in her short career as a journalist, but none so dark as this. She scanned the woods around them, looking for anything that would cut through it; headlights, a porch light, or – if she would really risk letting herself fixate on how that specific cassette tape found its way back into her stereo – a figure darker than night amongst the trees – but there was nothing but blackness around her, leaving her to easily guess her captor's intentions. It unwilling brought into her subconscious the words of that damn catchy song.

 _Shining star come into view_

"Pull over here," he ordered.

Her eyes flickered over to his tense form, noticing his seatbelt dangling lifeless against the door – and there, shining just passed him, was what she had been silently hoping for since she'd clicked off the radio. Chills spread across her skin. She only needed to make it a few more feet with her head still intact.

 _Shine its watchful light on you_

"Pull over!" he barked again.

And with the bomb-like impact came relief so overwhelming that she woke up from its emptiness with an almost dreadful air to her thoughts. It had been the first taste of sleep she'd experienced in three days, if it could even be labeled that, but she pushed back as hard as she could against the urge to rest her forehead on the steering wheel and wither away in the wreckage.

The gravel scratched against the exposed skin of her legs when she toppled out of the mangled pile of metal, but she managed to fight to her feet, cradling her useless left arm across her midsection as she backed away.

She was alone now, lulled by only the chilled air and soft sounds of the forest.

There was blood everywhere. It coated the shards of broken glass that once made up her passenger window and streaked a wide path of gore across the pavement, trailing well past the bank of the road, up into the dark tree line and beyond her view.

Another calling card of sorts. Each time he had tried to hide it from her – this part of him. And each time she found herself chasing after him, studying his every move, searching for the angels in his demons. She knew every bit of what he was capable of – what he believed he had to do – and what he would and would _not_ do for her.

It was why every instinct within her told her to stop, to turn around and get the hell out of this place – but like cool water to wild fire, the only possible way to earn any control of it was to catch it early.

"Frank," she called softly to the trees as she entered their veil.

The muscles in her battered legs protested against the uneven earth as she moved as quietly as she could through the brush. She heard them well before they came into view, Colonel Schoonover sending back a foolish stream of taunts pointed sharply at the man who sent a boot into the back of his knee.

Then he said it. A word that affected Frank more than the foul jab at his family, resulting in the bloodied man's spine crashing hard against the trunk of a tree. Frank's shoulders lifted with his ragged breaths as he spiraled into an angry fury that radiated through the night. She was too late.

"Khandahar!" the Colonel proclaimed with an eerie edge of glee. "You think they would ever let that go?"

The strange question stilled her. Frank unzipped his jacket, his hand going for the piece at his waistband. Karen conjured every ounce of reckless ambition she had left within her.

"Frank stop." She said firmly, grasping desperately on to the thin line that separated an order from a plea. "You don't have to kill him."

She was giving him a shot at redemption in her eyes right here. Right now. The chance she'd fought so hard to earn him – a clean slate – and she saw enough in the struggle of his own when they flickered to her to sense that a small part of him knew it too, knew exactly why she had followed the gruesome trail of warning he'd left her.

"Go back to your car." The command was dangerously quiet, but it shook the night.

"What's he talking about?" She ignored it fervently, unready to give up. "Khandahar – what's that, what happened?"

"Go."

"Did you do something?" Karen pressed. "They come after you – just tell me, tell me the truth, I'll help you figure it out," she leaned in toward him. "Just tell me the truth."

"Yeah, tell her the truth…" the Colonel sneered. "Tell her."

"Shut up!" Karen snapped at him, quickly turning her attention back over to the broken face that mirrored her. "Please, we'll figure it out," she pushed on, hearing the desperation lift her voice as she fought to keep his focus on her. "But if you kill him you will never know."

It was clear the very second the wrong words fell from her lips – signed the man's death sentence with nothing more than a few soft spoken promises. Frank's attention snapped onto her with severity that he had, until then, reserved only for his victims – a predator set free from its chains. His breathing hitched.

He snatched the man across the dirt toward a small, wooden shed nestled in the trees just a few yards away.

Karen didn't have much time. Her mind raced, searching for the right things to say – the right words to make him stop. But it was the overburdened, overpowering, permanently unresolved portion of himself that won the battle for his soul every time.

"No no no, _Frank_!" Her throat bit out his name, arms squeezed tight against the dread building beneath her sternum. She limped forward after them. "Listen to me – Frank! You do this and you are the monster they say you are, do you hear me!"

If he did, he paid her no mind, kicking the door of the wood shed open so hard that it was surprising it remained on its hinges. The sound pounded at her aching brain. He dragged the bloodied man inside behind him.

"You do this and I am done, that's it… You're dead to me." She put the only thing she had left to bargain with on the line. If he lost his fight, she'd lost hers too. No longer could she stand back and do nothing while people – not innocent, but still people – were murdered in cold blood right in front of her; caring far too much for a careless man.

A single kick of his boot sent the Colonel's body out of her view.

He straightened and flipped on the fluorescent shed lights, casting a broad silhouette that sheathed the forest floor in darkness right up to the tips of her shoes. The sudden brightness blinded her eyes and as she moved to close the distance – to pour every last bit of herself into the most important fight of her life – she tripped over herself, stumbling forward onto already bruised knees and fully into the shadow of him.

Frank moved forward a half step, bracing his hand against the door frame as if the hollow threshold were his prison cell.

He was nothing more than a formless blur to her now.

"Do you hear me, Frank," she repeated lower, the stone in her throat growing heavier with every word.

After a few seconds, he took a single heavy step back, the wooden floor groaning under his weight.

"I'm already dead."

It was all he gave her, slamming the door shut with a sickening finality that sent her falling forward onto her hands, and shattered her thoughts across the dirt in all directions. She could feel the betrayal seeping into the broken parts of her and tearing them at their already fraying seams, the pain of it nearly matching the pulsing that started at her hairline and now shook violently down her spine.

She was so, so tired. Tired of being lied to and let down by the few people she chose to keep near her. Acknowledging that she had not been the best judge of character as of late proved no issue, but this loss, for some unforeseeable reason, hurt infinitely more than the others before it. There was no clear cut category that she could place him in – no longer was he just a client. That time had long since passed. He most certainly had not been her friend... but never her enemy either – not really. So the only conclusion she could pull from the fog of her mind was _challenge_. One that rivaled a glance in the mirror after the things she'd done to try and overcome it. He was something she thought she could fix, and had tried so hard that she destroyed herself.

Though, it wasn't like he hadn't tried to stop her.

The crack of the gunshot could have been miles away.

She sobbed into the earth, sounding weak and disgraceful to her own ears, well past the point of reining it in. It had always been there, balled up tight within her, the driving force that pushed her toward the real truth – the one she always seemed to find at the end of trails of blood. She could taste it now, the tinge of iron on her lips, and with it, her thoughts muddled dense in her brain.

A creaking sound came from somewhere close by.

A second later and his hands were on her, too gentle to be the same man that had lost all her faith with the latch of a door. She blinked rapidly to clear her eyes and saw the stars above.

Dirt mingled with blood, thick against her skin – lots of it, oozing freely from the gash at her forehead and smearing down her cheek to war with the pale trails of her tears.

She looked anywhere but at him.

"I told you to go." It rolled uncharacteristically soft from him, close at her side, drawing from her the choked offspring of a sobbed laugh and she hated the sound of it.

How maddening it was when his words said one thing but his tone, another. Her eyes finally found him but would not focus.

"Where?" Karen breathed, voiceless.

After a long moment Frank exhaled, rough and ancient like the discarded air had been trapped beneath his suffering for centuries. He answered her with the shift of his weight and before she could draw forth the energy to shove him away and curse his name in all the ways her lips knew how, she was being lifted from the ground.

* * *

 **Song referenced:** _Earth Wind and Fire - Shining Star_


	2. His Light

_**A/N:**_ A huge thank you to those of you who took the time to review/fave/follow this story! I will be trying to keep updates coming every couple weeks and I'm so happy I got this one done in time for Kastle appreciation week. Enjoy!

* * *

 _ **We're all in the same game,**_  
 _ **just different levels  
**_ _ **Dealing with the same hell,  
**_ _ **just different devils**_

~Unknown~

"We're talking about your life Mr. Castle. We can help you keep what's left of it."

Frank had huffed at that, uncertain if the rambling lawyer was truly blind behind those dark sunglasses until right then. Not only did they represent shitbags, but they sucked at it too.

"Hm, yeah. Kinda' like what you did for Grotto." Frank glanced sidelong at the familiar blonde woman, her face lacking any of the fear from the first time he had seen it down the barrel of a gun. Instead she wore the sting of his words like a valiant mask, leading her right up to his bedside as if he'd already been tried and terminated where he lay.

She had held up _that_ picture of his family at the carousel.

"You want answers?" She sent his poison back to him, golden locks whipping over her shoulders as she fought off the lawyers' attempt to pull her away. "So do we. But none of us will get them if you're dead."

It was then, for the split second he found himself victim to the razor's edge of blue eyes, that Frank had absently wondered if she was blind too. The clearest cut lines just didn't seem to faze her. Not intertwining herself within the affairs of the city's filth, or the ones the FBI had taped around his hospital bed at what they considered a safe distance – shit, not even the ones most people would consider personal bounds.

"Where did you get that?" He asked, voice leaden with the growing ache in his chest caused by so much more than the bruising restraints. There was only one place that picture could have come from and it had not been hers to access.

"From your home." She'd confirmed softer, the edge slipping fast from her expression as something apologetic and fathomless filled in. He wasn't used to that look anymore. It did nothing to soften the blow.

"You were in my home?" He asked, chest heaving air into hollow lungs twice. "Why were you in my house?"

Just then, the sound of angry yelling filled the room from outside the closed door, but his attention remained locked, her soft declaration the only sound that reached keen ears.

"Someone is lying about what happened to your family Mr. Castle." She held his gaze, unhindered by the district attorney's thunderous attempts to bar them from the room, and in those few seconds Frank saw enough to know that she was as sure as he was.

The DA would continue to lay out her façade of an agenda before him long after the trio had been removed, but Frank had smelt the first signs of bullshit well ahead of being warned by a pair of painfully fearless eyes. And when she returned with the other, perspiring lawyer, moving smoothly across the room to sit in the steel chair at his bedside, he couldn't take his off the puzzle of her. This woman had visited the home of a man who she had to believe tried to blow her to bits after her involvement in his pursuit of Grotto. Her line of work alone should have made the list of possible consequences clear as day. That just left the screaming _why_.

The nervous one would have to stop talking before he got the answers only she could know. From the very beginning it had to be her.

* * *

He had not expected to feel so exposed. There was something knowing about her, the way the corners of her eyes crinkled with his pain and turned to glass with his, keeping word after word tumbling from him before he'd realized just how far in he'd gotten himself.

Frank could see it now –the wooden floor of the living room scattered with farm animals, army men, and their colorful Lego fortresses, always dotted by a trail of cookie crumbs that just so happened to end near the piano bench.

She would walk his memory through the kitchen, up the stairs, and into his children's bedrooms and he would follow her almost as naturally as if he'd just gotten home from a hard day's work instead of the alternative that was in every way his life now.

He would continue to follow her through his own trial, listening to her every plan and plot to get him the shortest prison sentence possible, all the while trying to fathom why she would allow herself to lose so much sleep over it. In the process, he would come to know the fire of her anger when something he said sent it rising in her voice and the tenderness of her heart when she would return to his side over and over again, despite it. He would thank her by blowing all her hard work to shit, swearing to himself that if this Fisk fellow was really interested in his affairs, it was for her own good as much as his.

In prison, Fisk would mention her name, tacking it onto the end of the two lawyers that seemed to orbit around her with a promise that he would never see the light of day beyond that jail block should he not take care of the task he was handed.

The threats were ignored, but noted, giving Frank a good enough excuse to go to her the second he was free and be sure they were as hollow and empty as the vermin who'd spoken them – and thank Christ he had.

He tore himself away from the alternative – his wife and children lying lifeless all around him, clothes and skin stained red with their blood before a bullet to the skull would momentarily end his misery. His reaction had been too slow to save them leaving a part of him, a huge, gaping part of him that he could never repair, torn away so swiftly and unjustly that he was sure it would kill him if he allowed it to happen again.

Tracing her steps would come as easily to him as the pull of a trigger after that. Danger clung to the woman like spilled ink onto cloth and he would be the one to follow just close enough to put it down and erase it from existence for good. It was never supposed to go beyond that.

But just as naturally, like a bright winged moth to blazing fire, she would follow the trail of blood into the woods after him.

* * *

This line crossed was familiar and dangerous as he cleared the hallway to her apartment door, her half-conscious frame supported against him, though never too tight. Frank pressed his back against the door, its handle and lock dangling uselessly beside his thigh, pushing it open a few inches and scanning the tight space over his shoulder.

It was dark inside, but from what he could tell it looked relatively untouched since the last time he'd been there. Broken glass still sprawled across the small couch and ground, the parallel wall marked by deep bullet holes. He stilled them and listened. Cream, silk curtains fluttered freely in the night breeze and the sounds of the city below hummed softly through the destroyed windows, the space somehow simultaneously lacking imminent threat and adequate shelter.

He moved them across the threshold, one arm supporting Karen behind the shoulders, the other hand ready over the holstered handgun at his ribs. He stopped against the wall to clear the corner – the kitchen – and finally the bathroom, before he eased her down into her bed, switching on the small lamp on her nightstand as soon as his hands were free.

Blood matted in the hair at her forehead, lines of black cutting starkly against her pale skin in a way he did not like. She was too still – the lack of emotion on her face and long lashes brushing against her cheeks bringing on memories that left his pointer finger tapping against the side of his leg.

He would only falter a second longer to catch the even rise and fall of her chest before taking action.

* * *

It was still dark when Karen opened her eyes, her vision fuzzy around the edges from the dulled waves of ache. She blinked at the soft rays of moonlight that draped across the carpet beyond her bed, her attention ensnared by the calming rise and fall of her badly battered curtains. The distant sound of sirens and humming fluorescents registered in her tired brain, and finally a small sense of relief came with them. Only then did she fully believe she was back in her apartment and no longer alone in the deafening silence of the woods.

The _woods_.

Her fingers rose to where her head hurt most and met the slick plastic of a pair of butterfly closures over an impressively sized gash. She pressed against the tender skin there, drawing a hiss that almost slipped past her teeth, but something moved in the shadows of her kitchen and she froze, her fingertips stilling at her hairline.

The moon casted just enough light for her squinting eyes to make him out almost instantly, the faded haircut at the back of his head and width of him alone giving it away. Her heart did something in her chest with the realization, the last words she'd spoken to him still fresh at the front of her mind.

He faced away from her at the sink, the muscle at the back of shoulders shifting as he dipped a washrag into the water, the lighter skin of the base of his neck and arms standing out against the black t-shirt he wore.

Karen watched as he methodically scrubbed his hands, between his fingers, up his forearms, and over again in harsh patterns that she knew all too well. He was just about to begin the routine a fourth time.

"Frank, it's okay," she breathed, sparing her voice for the sake of her own head but knowing he would still hear the lie in it. Her hand dropped slowly from her forehead, fingertips grazing against the smooth skin of her unsoiled cheek before she let it fall to rest over the blanket he had to have draped over her waist.

The blood would never come off. Not really.

It was enough to stop him, his head falling unceremoniously out of view for a long moment before he dropped the stained rag in the sink and moved to the kitchen entryway. The ashen moon reflected in his eyes and casted deep shadows across already bruised cheekbones like a sky-hung spotlight.

"Don't give me that." He said, voice low as the city beneath them, his gaze flickering from her to the windows and back. "I heard you loud and clear back there."

At least once, they had both made the mistake of giving the other an agenda in the form of not so friendly advice. She'd never been a fan of them either.

"Then why are you still here?" Karen asked, fighting to keep her tone unaccusing, because while a bloom of frustration made itself known in the base of her chest, just as it very often did when he came at her like this, there was genuine curiosity there too.

Frank shifted uneasily, leaning his weight against the wood frame.

"You passed out."

"You _killed_ him." Karen returned, the word escaping sharp from her lips as the replaying memory of the night before spun over and over behind her eyes.

"No shit," Frank snapped and straightened, moving to stand a few steps from the end of her bed. "A lot quicker than he deserved too, but you – you knew that. He would have killed you – would have killed a lot more people. So I put a stop to it."

"As is your express right," she countered, the bite of her frustration breaking through in harsh sarcasm, leading her to struggle to a sitting position against the uncomfortable iron poles behind her back.

Hardened eyes challenged her.

"I like to think of it as more of a privilege, ma'am."

And oh how that sent her blood boiling, just how he knew it would.

" _Asshole_."

Frank bit at a humorless smirk with her hiss, his attention returning out the window before it could reach his eyes. He grimaced at the neighboring rooftops instead.

"You knew that already too… So what were you looking for?"

Karen suddenly found something very interesting about her hands in her lap, her anger going cold as a soft blush rose to her cheeks. She thanked whoever was listening for the thin cover of darkness. It was a question she had asked herself a few times on the long drive from the city to Colonel Schoonover's home. The answer, though, was still unsettling and unsafe and just beyond her grasp. It left her silent.

"Why were you out there, Karen?" He asked her again when she didn't answer, and her name mixing in with the innate concern on his gravelly voice was something new. It drew her wide eyes up to him like wildflowers to rain. She hadn't been one-hundred percent sure he had even known it, or cared enough to, until then.

She dropped her gaze, carefully tucking the hair away from the wounded side of her temple and swallowed sand.

"I could ask you the same question." A diversion was better than a lie, she thought, though he deserved neither from her. "How did you know I was in trouble?"

He half shrugged. "Just luck I guess. I recognized one of the lowlifes at the dock and put two an' two together."

Karen's arms crossed over her chest, easily identifying his nonchalance as the first tell of impending bullshit.

"And you just assumed I'd like to listen to some upbeat tunes on the drive home?" Her eyes thinned.

Frank exhaled through his nose.

"I had to be sure it was him, okay – a part of me couldn't…" He hesitated, turning away from the window to fully face her. He took the three steps to her bedside. "If he suspected anything funny, he woulda shot you on sight. You have to understand that."

His eyes on her were torn, heavy but warm, like the quilt that lay comfortably across her. There was sadness etched around them in the grim expression he wore again, almost as permanently as his past and it hit her like a brick to the skull when she was so suddenly reminded that the warning was one forged by experience. How selfish was she to ask him to see past it, to try and take his only form of repentance from him. She could never agree with it – never would, but he wouldn't asked her to and she couldn't remember a time when she'd ever felt so overwhelmingly out of her place.

"I do," Karen nodded softly, "and I'm sorry for what I said…"

"Don't." He stopped her short and she lost him again as he shifted a step back with the shake of his head, almost as if she'd physically struck him. He half-turned to face her door. "Don't be. Because you were right. As I see it, there's only one place for pieces of shit like that and it ain't a cushy prison cell. I'm not gonna stop."

"I know," she said sadly, accepting it as the truth from the second he'd closed the door of that small shed in the woods. It hadn't taken long to process and accept the fact that she had been right. Staying as far away as possible from the man standing at her bedside would be the best, and most expected option for her from all parties involved. But she would never be able to clean the blood from her own hands, so she couldn't be the one to hold him responsible for his. Not tonight. "But I'm no quitter either, Frank. _You_ have to understand that." She used his own pointed words against him.

He sent a disapproving look over his shoulder but the admonishment she'd grown to expect from others never came.

"Then you're sure as hell gonna need some rest." He said mirthlessly, moving back to his post at her window.

After a long moment, Karen followed his solemn gaze to the skyline.

"You're going out there tonight, aren't you?" She asked carefully, not fully sure how to prepare herself for his answer, either way.

"No. not tonight."

It surprised her and sent warm tendrils of relief through her all at once. Her eyes grew heavy beneath the weight of it. She let herself relax back down into her pillows, hyper aware then that his distinctive presence brought her more peace in her own apartment than she had felt in a long time.

"Then you should get some rest too," she murmured hazily, her eyes slipping shut as the pain in her muscles faded blissfully to the far reaches of her conscious. "The couch is yours. It's small, but comfortable." An apology with a lazy shrug.

She missed the reaction it earned from him.

* * *

The sun was already high in the sky when she awoke the next morning. Karen tested her muscles as she sat up, still feeling the stiffness in her shoulder and the greatly reduced, but still very much there, burning in her head. Alertness washed over her when she spotted the laptop resting at the end of her bed, its power-cord wrapped around it with a note tucked between.

 _Window repair men coming this afternoon.  
They will call before they come up.  
Please take a sick day._

The handwriting was immaculate and official, unmistakable. She almost rolled her eyes, looking over the note to find that her floor had been cleared of debris and her front door reinforced with a make-shift locking system that looked oddly out of place in her newly tidied apartment – until she glanced sideways at the bullet holes, still in the drywall and her memory like permanent scars.

She had to admit though, her office laptop was a nice touch, but him knowing where to find it confirmed everything she already knew and awoke the nerves beneath her skin. Someone had been very busy last night, and many before that.

With the thought, her attention subconsciously drifted to the small couch between the windows. It was untouched, the throw blanket still hanging crooked over the back of it where she'd tossed it after a trip to the laundromat last week. A part of her wondered if the man ever slept at all.

She would spend the rest of the morning sipping at her coffee and staring at a blank Word document, doing everything in her power to sit tight and heed his handwritten warning. There had to be a good reason for it. There always was. But that fact alone left her itching to get out the door.

Before she could stop herself she was showered and dressed, determined fingers fidgeting with the turn on the lock.


	3. Her Nightmare

_**A/N:**_ Small trigger warning for this chapter, please be advised.  
It's also just a bit heavier with language but writing for Frank is just too much fun. Enjoy!

* * *

 _ **Virtue is an angel**_  
 _ **but [he] is a blind one,**_  
 _ **and must ask Knowledge**_  
 _ **to show [him] the pathway**_  
 _ **that leads to [his] goal**_

~Horace Mann~

The Bulletin was already buzzing with the news.

Karen flicked on the small television in her office, not even having enough time to sit down before the headline flashing along the bottom of the screen snatched every ounce of her attention.

 **String of Serial Abductions in Hell's Kitchen**

One witness after another were shown on the streets giving their firsthand accounts to the pushy blonde reporter, some covered in blood that wasn't their own, crying for their stolen loved ones, and others too injured to speak as they were rushed off camera by EMS.

 _They mentioned the Devil_ , one shaky voice spoke into the microphone. _T_ _hat if he didn't come, they would all die._ The young woman's sodden eyes seemed to look straight through the screen and into hers. _Please Daredevil, please, you have to stop them._

And it struck Karen that this was exactly what whoever this was wanted to happen. Public coverage.

If they were looking to draw the Devil out of hiding with his past, she wasn't safe here, wasn't safe at all, not with the amount of news stories their names shared. And she would not be putting her co-workers on the growing victim list.

Of course Frank had been right.

Karen slung her purse over her shoulder and bolted, dodging Ellison's concerned expression, and pulling the door shut securely behind her.

She hadn't made it fully out of view of the building before the foul smelling rag was forced over her nose and mouth. The fight slipped quick from her muscles, leaving her view of the bustling city morning just beyond the parking lot to fade to an all consuming black.

* * *

There was a chill to the early morning air and Frank couldn't help but favor it. It went well with the coffee that warmed his palms, his dark jacket now blending in with the herds of people rushing along the city streets in similar attire and making it much easier to move inconspicuously among them like the ghost he was supposed to be. Even in broad daylight. Still, he pulled his black baseball cap low over matching eyes and kept his head down, occasionally skimming along the faces of people too busy in their own worlds to pay him any attention.

The steady stream of stimulation combined with lack of sleep was exhausting. He preferred the mostly empty streets of the city at night to this, but there had been more important things to tend to and there was work to still be done.

He only had to make it to 57th street, out of the armpit of the city, though clinging just close enough to it so that the smell never really left the air. The apartment was a shithole, but he could see the Hudson from one dingy window and the endless green of Central Park from the opposite, the smog and sirens and aging steel of Hell's Kitchen consuming every square inch of space in between. Staying in the same place for too long was never a good idea but it had become a base camp of sorts, and now with the arsenal of new technology to experiment with, somewhere safe and off the grid to store it was a necessity. And you really couldn't beat the view from the roof.

The flashing traffic light had just granted him permission to cross 53rd when he heard it – the muffled sound of distress that came from somewhere above in the apartment building that hugged the corner behind him. He turned around on the alert, eyes searching the area for any signs of trouble, but only found patrons looking down at their electronics and shuffling past him to make it across before the light changed. Not a single damn one of them had noticed it.

He had been close to blaming sleep deprivation before it sounded again, this time more loud and afraid – young.

Faster than he could formulate a full plan of action, the remaining coffee in the small paper cup became a stain on the pavement. He was moving, pushing past a few people and earning an ignored curse or two along the way.

He made it up the concrete steps and stopped at the buzzer panel. It was a cheap one – just like the one he'd broken through to get into Karen's apartment once or twice. He tucked the thought into the archives of his mind and pressed the intercom button down with his thumb, rapping his forefinger against the microphone at the same time to create static and mimic the sound of being buzzed in.

The lock gave open just as easily as he hoped it wouldn't and he slowly moved through the entrance, hand ready at the pistol he held just under the edge of his jacket.

It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the dimness of the place, the few fluorescence that still worked flickering sadly along the ceiling. The stairs whined beneath his feet as he ascended the first couple floors, stopping to listen and clear each of their hallways before he moved on to the next. From what he could gather, the building seemed relatively quiet, its tenants either already escaping its confines for the day or still in drug induced stupors, judging by the smell of the place.

It wasn't until the fourth floor that he noticed the busted lock on the apartment door at the middle of the hallway, the crack in it sending a strip of sunlight cutting across the stained carpet. Shadows passed through it, back and forth in swift motions.

Glass broke. A choked sob followed.

He moved again, gun drawn, steady and soundless, keeping his back parallel to the wall. He stopped right before he reached the door, kicking it open in one swift motion, and glancing in from behind the protection of the wood frame.

It took him a second to sort out what was happening.

There were two of them, dressed from head to toe in black and red, the lower halves of their faces cloaked in the neck of their robes. A pair of katanas pointed in his direction and gleamed in the natural light from the broken window. His eyes thinned. He'd seen some comical shit since his watch began, but the Kitchen seemed determined to serve up something new and more staggering every day.

His attention dropped to the dying man at their feet, blood falling lazily from the deep slit in his throat. At the same time, soft cries came from beneath the small coffee table at the center of the living space, sobering him like a punch to the gut.

The two assailants kept their blades in his direction as they shifted toward the young boy.

Frank took aim, but before his finger could press back the trigger he was under attack.

They were unnaturally fast, maneuvering over the furniture like it wasn't even in their path, and with the swipe of a blade, his gun was knocked from his hand sending a loud _clack_ through the air when it bounced against the tiled floor. He ducked just in time for the second swing to blur across the space just over his head, using the forced positioning to spear one of them. Frank's shoulder punched hard into the attacker's ribcage, sending him flying backward against the far wall.

He grabbed the tac-knife from his boot and rose to see the other one making a mad dash for the table. Frank caught him by the shoulder, one arm wrapping up under his arm and tight around his neck, his loaded hand stabbing deep into the man's chest two – three – four quick times leaving blood, warm and slick, to coat his fingers. The man fought against his grip, swinging his sword wildly in one last, desperate attempt over his shoulder. It caught Frank high on the arm and with the electric jolt of pain, something red awoke inside him.

He trapped the man's wrist in his hand, the fiber of his muscles tightening fast around the sinew of the man's throat and with a satisfying _snap_ his head fell crooked against his body, lifeless along the ground.

Frank stood over him for a moment, ragged breaths shaking through his chest. His attention flickered between the hunched masked man against the wall and terrified eyes – they turned away from him and Frank's followed – to the lifeless older man, sprawled face up beneath the windows, draped in a pool of scarlet and drowned in his own blood.

A growl scratched from his throat when he crossed the space to snatch the still-living intruder up, dragging him by the shoulders of his robe around the corner into the small kitchenette. He tore the mask from his face, fingers wrapping tight into the fabric on either side of his neck.

"Who sent you?"

Frank traced the smallest bit of healthy fear in his face, but his eyes gave away the arrogance of experience and targeted training. He was proud of his work and it would be the death of him.

The toe of Frank's boot planted hard against his rib-cage repeatedly.

"Who sent you, asshole? Why were you here?"

The only answer he received was a low groan and defiant silence. The man spat to the side and lifted his chin.

"Okay," Frank nodded, dropping to a knee and putting the weight of it down hard on his chest.

Unforgiving knuckles crashed into his jawbone - cheek - temple, again and again until he finally raised his hands between them in an attempt to block the onslaught and cried out in a foreign language.

Frank paused, drawing harsh breaths between parted lips. He watched as blood trailed out from the gaps where teeth should have been. The man released a choked cough and red spattered down his chin.

" _Devil_ …" His accent was thick around the curse. He coughed again, a gurgled sound of wet breath. "To draw out the Devil."

Frank's hand fell. Of fucking course. Ole Red was good at making powerful enemies, but this was getting old, fast. He was too much of a chicken to do anything worth a shit about it, so someone else – someone innocent – was always left to pay the price.

If they wanted a devil, they would get one.

Frank pulled the man's head up against the wall, just enough for him to clear his mouth.

"Where?"

He shifted quick in Frank's hold, but before he could reach for whatever he was going for at his hip, the blade of a knife indented the tanned skin at the man's throat.

"Where?" He repeated between his teeth.

The address would be the last words to escape him before he was left to choke on them.

Frank stood and moved to the sink, methodically washing away the blood from himself and the steel blade, as he did what he could to steady his chest. The kitchen was small, most of it now splattered in the evidence of his handiwork, including the family photos held against the old fridge by colorful, magnetic letters. He diverted his eyes, but not fast enough for him to miss the name spelled out in them.

Tucking away his knife into his boot, he turned the corner to find the boy trembling in the same spot, his back pressed against the far corner leg of the table, hands clasped tight against his ears. Death surrounded him. When he finally cracked his eyes open enough to notice Frank, he flinched back, palms shooting out in front of him defensively, and Frank was left to imagine what he must look like to the child at that moment, a monster masked in blood and bruises.

He held open hands out to either side.

"You're alright," he tried, but the lie was bitter on his tongue, reminding him of every broken promise he'd ever made. He pushed them far back and went with a solid truth instead. "I'm not gunna hurt you, Erick."

The kid's shoulders drooped in relief and it was almost heartbreaking how easily his innocence allowed him to trust nothing more than his word. Sad sobs soon followed, shaking through his tiny frame.

"My dad…" He cried, crawling on hands and knees to look over at the man beneath the windows. He hesitated under the table's edge. "They were after me. He tried to stop them and they... They killed him."

The boy moved to the man's side. Frank looked away.

"It's not your fault kid," he said, gathering his wits about him and cursing himself silently. He had just taken the life of two men with his bare hands, but couldn't look a crying child in the eye. Coward.

A long stretch of silence followed, broken only by soft sniffles and rolling sobs. Frank would glance over every so often as he lifted the corded phone from the wall, dialed 911, and hung up right after a voice asked for the emergency.

"Do you help the other guy?" The boy's soft question maneuvered its way through him and furrowed on his brow. "The one they were looking for?"

Frank faced him and moved a safe distance closer.

"How do you know who they're lookin' for?"

The boy swiped the back of his hand beneath his nose and sniffed.

"Because he saved me once." His small voice was raw and broken in his throat and Frank had to consciously keep his hands still. "I was kidnapped by bad guys and he brought me back to – m-my dad."

Frank's jaw twitched. God _damn_ him. Every time he came close to having a good enough reason to rip the horns from the Devil's head, it was taken away by the grating reminder of their shared cause. If he could only see the shit his methods left behind – Frank had tried his damnedest to show him – and this right here was the exact reason why, leaving him to rescue the same victims from the brink of hell a second time, but not before they'd been permanently scarred. Never before.

If they were trying to draw him out using his previous rescues, he was sure alter boy's list was long and riddled with unsuspecting targets. Especially those he watched over even when he wasn't wearing the mask.

He turned to pick his gun from the floor, sliding it into his holster and tucking it out of sight from watchful eyes.

"No, I work alone. You got any other family around here kid?"

Timid eyes flicked from his father up to where he knew the gun was beneath Frank's jacket.

"My aunt. She lives upstate." He replied shyly after a moment.

Good. Out of the city.

"Listen," Frank felt the weight of his past creeping up on his shoulders and he steeled himself beneath it. "Things are going to be different now without your dad around, but there's nothing you could have done about it, you hear me?" He waited for an affirming nod before he continued. "Help's comin'. Tell them about your aunt. You'll be safe there."

Sad eyes rounded with renewed fear. The boy looked over toward the dead man robed in black.

"If I do, will they come for her too?"

Frank met his eyes. Something tore in his chest.

"No. They won't."

And it was a promise birthed by the burning need for rightful retaliation.

He would duck out the fire escape only after hearing the sound of the police moving up the hall, the broken _thank you_ just barely registering on the child's voice as he descended the ladder quickening his steps and turning fiery rage to fuel.

* * *

Karen's mind came alive first, wretchedly slow, but still faster than her body could match. The sluggishness in her bones rolled off her inch by inch, replaced instead by searing pain. She blinked deep sleep from her eyes.

A rope, anchored high above in the shadowed ceiling was wrapped tight around her wrists, trapping her hands together over her head. Her brain snapped awake and she tugged against her bindings, the skin there already raw and her injured shoulder muscles screaming. If she could just get the knot down to her teeth – but the taught twine gave no inch of slack. Instead, she gathered the strength to press herself up onto her bare toes, taking some of the pressure of her body weight off burning arms.

Thin fingers bent forward in contorted positions as she strained them to reach the tie. It mocked her just out of her reach, expertly set so that its victim could see their escape right before their eyes, but never reach it.

The fear only strengthened her focus and she searched the space for anything that could help her.

The contents of her purse scattered the ground a few feet away. Sandbags were piled on old pallets, dotting the wide space all around, and the air was thick with the smell of iron and stale water. It was a warehouse of some sort, lit by only the dim, orange streetlight shining through scattered rusted holes high along the walls, and the realization instantly brought on the engulfing sense of déjà vu. She blinked away at the imagined sight. Red on white.

Her phone rang from somewhere nearby and she turned on the balls of her feet to find it – blood turned to lead in her veins when she found them, instead.

Two men watched her from the shadows, the faint light reflecting off the sickly sheen of their foreheads. Even with their profiles skewed by the darkness, she would never forget their faces.

One was bald, the side of his head where Foggy's bat had struck it still, month's later, an angrier color than the rest of him. The other had a decidedly ugly tattoo that sheathed his skin from neck to wrist.

* * *

Frank was armored down in his vest and set up on the rooftop well before the sun fell below the skyline.

He kept busy while he waited, cleaning the barrel of the sniper rifle across his lap and setting the sight a second time to be sure that no one undeserving would see the light of a new day. More than just that though, it was a distraction. One that kept him from giving in to the strange inkling that toyed with his mind and made him want to pull out the burner phone from his jacket pocket and call Karen. He had asked her to stay home after seeing the first few abductions reported in the early morning news, but if there had been anything for him to take from their time together, it was that self-endangering defiance burned in her blood almost as hotly as it did his own.

He was pressing the last of the bullets into the clip when he spotted them on the neighboring rooftop, the saintly star of the show himself, joined by an exotic looking woman he'd never seen before.

Frank knew well enough from the faint screams and shouting that resounded every so often from the building between them that the captives were being held there. And if he could hear them, Red could too.

"Just make it to the roof," Frank said flatly, as if they were standing side by side instead of a hundred yards apart. He waited for the small tick of his helmet before he sat back down against the rafters and continued his watch.

* * *

They had put down each and every last one of them, the rooftop now plagued by sores of bodies sheathed in black.

Red had lost someone. Frank had watched it happen down the scope of his gun, unable to get a clean shot. But at the end of the fight, while a maskless Murdock pressed his head down against her body, he was busy scanning the growing crowd below through the darkness in search of a familiar face.

When he didn't find it, he knew he'd been right. Something was wrong. News of what was happening had to be circulating by now, and if she hadn't found herself caught up in the middle, her curiosity should have led her right to it - right to him.

He gave her a chance to answer her phone, just in case his suspicions were wrong.

When she didn't, he tracked the signal instead.

* * *

Karen's heart went wild in her chest and she thrashed against the rope, wrapping her fingers around what she could of it and pulling with every ounce of panicked strength. Fisk's voice mocked her at the back of her mind. Beads of crimson traced down her forearm, but there was no room in her senses for pain anymore.

She watched helplessly as they stalked toward her, tugging and tugging at the rope until her muscles turned numb. A scream built within her, but a tattooed arm held the pointed blade of a knife in her direction and it caught thick in her throat.

"Ah ah ah," he tisked, snaking forward to catch her chin in a filthy hand. "Scream and you will get every bit of the punishment you deserve – pepper spray and all." He added scornfully, and was close enough that the foul stench of cigarettes and gingivitis gagged her.

"Sure would be a shame," the bald one added, circling too close behind her. "Boss man said to take you out, but me and my buddy here think it would be a terrible waste of talent."

"I'd rather you just kill me," Karen bit out with all the poison she could muster. She felt the weight of fingers tugging at her hair. It rose bile in her mouth. "Get away from me," she jerked her head, but tattooed fingers slid to her throat and tightened.

All at once, hands fisted in the roots at the back of her head and tore at the buttons on her blouse.

"Get off!" She gasped, thrashing against them and kicking her feet until one connected square into the arch between her captor's legs.

The man hunched forward with a growl.

"Hold her still, will ya!" He hissed past her when he straightened. His hands fumbled to unlatch the buckle of his belt and Karen's stomach dropped when pain morphed into something foul in his eyes. "This could have gone way better for you…"

The sound of metal tearing against metal drowned out the last of his words, but to her ears it could have been the screaming curls of a fortifying lullaby. Karen forced her gaze beyond them to watch the large warehouse door lazily rolling up and open.

Three sets of eyes squinted at the pair of glaring spotlights that shown in from either side, draping the world in blinding white. A broad figure stood between them, traced in light and shadowed by darkness, looking every bit like the angel to her right then that his devils drove him to be.

All hands fell from her skin as the men scrambled for their drooping waistbands.

"I could say the same." It passed her lips almost distracted as she basked in the flooding warmth of relief.

* * *

Karen looked anywhere but down as Frank cut through the rope around her wrists with practiced precision.

As soon as she was free, he shrugged his jacket off, exposing the newly spray-painted skull on his vest, and dried blood etched around a deep slit in the skin across his left arm. He draped it around her shoulders and pulled it closed at the front over her torn blouse.

"You hurt anywhere besides your wrists?" He asked, his eyes running over the plains of her flushed face and neck before he fully released it over to her.

Her fingers wrapped tightly around the hems in an attempt to stop them from shaking. The warmth and scent of it were steadying.

"No. I- um, I'm fine." She nodded too fast, the face he made letting her know that he didn't quite believe her. "Thank you." She met his eyes in earnest, but couldn't stop herself from glancing again at his gaping shirt sleeve. "Are you okay?"

"Don't worry about me. Let's get out of here."

 _Before the cops show up._ He didn't have to say it. There was no way anyone within a mile radius would've missed the sounds that had come from the men at their feet. Frank held a stabling hand beneath her elbow as she maneuvered herself around them, storing the thought away somewhere dark and sated in her memory.

As they made their way to the entrance of the warehouse, something metal cracked loud against the wall, echoing in the air and shattering the pair of spotlights faster than Karen could flinch.

The sudden darkness was nearly as blinding, but this time a figure stood between them draped only in the shadows of night. Before her eyes could focus on who it was, Frank's form shifted from her side to halfway in front of her, his gun pointed forward and trigger finger ready.

"It's just me," the faceless man said and the sound of his voice piqued her curiosity.

Frank visibly relaxed before her, though his gun remained raised.

"I ought to pop the shit out of you again for that." Frank huffed, knowing well that a dramatic entrance and a couple busted lights were the least of his sins.

A mirthless chuckle came from the shadow. "You had your chance. What happened here Frank?"

"The same thing that happened back there, Red," Frank sent back, dropping the gun to rest against his leg, and sounding tired. "Just cleaning up your goddamn mess."

And if Karen hadn't been innately interested before, she sure as hell was now. But she bit her tongue and listened.

"Don't give me that shit," Red pushed back, and Frank liked him like this, liked knowing it was there inside him, always ready for a good fight. "I never asked for your help."

"Oh yeah?" Frank asked, bobbing his head in feigned agreement. "Well if I hadn't stepped in, there would've been another little boy trapped in that shit storm, you know that?" He stepped forward, turning to briefly meet Karen's eyes and pointing a finger toward the mangled bodies behind her. "And those two bastards in there, you know about any of the shit they've done, Red? What they would continue to do if I didn't send them straight back to hell?" Something smug pulled at Frank's lip and if he could have only one thing right then, it would be the ability to give Murdock his eyesight back just long enough for him to see what he'd caught those assholes about to do before he put them down. Just so he could do so all over again. "You know, you talk like you're some badass shrink who thinks he's better than everyone he preaches at, but you wanna know what I think?"

Red threw out his hands. "Oh, please do tell."

"I think you need to see one yourself." Frank walked right up to him. "Because you're fuckin' nuts if you think what you're doing is helping this city."

The Devil snarled, shoving his hands against Frank's chest and sending him backwards a few steps.

"What would you have me do, huh? Mow down everyone who gets a speeding ticket?"

Frank snorted and squared up.

"Don't give me too much credit, Red. You've killed just as many people as you've saved." Dark eyes thinned. "Probably more than me."

And right before the two men collided, it all clicked together in Karen's swirling mind, sending her emotions on a roller coaster ride from hell. The bruises and strange behavior in the office. The voice, familiar to her ears – The self-righteousness…

"Matt?"

Karen called his name and the man in red froze in his tracks.

Frank's eyes drifted to her, his fist lowering slowly from the air as he pieced out what was happening between them. It added another little tick to the growing list of reasons he would kick Red's ass every chance he got.

He really did lie to her a lot.


	4. His Fight

_**A/N:**_ A thousand thank yous to you all.  
This fandom is the best.

 _ **She** **has been through hell.**_  
 _ **So believe me when I say,**_  
 _ **fear her when she looks**_  
 _ **into a fire and smiles.**_

~E. Corona~

"Karen, you've got to give me something to work with here."

Her fingers still sank into the warm fabric around her with one hand. Battered heels hung from the other, nudging against her leg as she paced quicker than comfortable along the dark sidewalk. She couldn't do this right now. There was no space left in her tired psyche for what it would require.

Only one of the pair of men remained at her side in the shadows, the other disappearing with a knowing look to his eyes as opportunely as he'd arrived – though a dwindling, unseen presence rose the small hairs at the base of her skull and had her glancing toward the rooftops every so often as she moved along the streets. It could've just been paranoia, but at least it briefly distracted her from Matt's endless plea for understanding.

She'd known he was a liar and that he was required to be good at it in his profession. But she never could have prepared herself for one of this caliber.

"Just say something… _please_?"

The strain on the word somehow fanned at the flame creeping around her heart and did enough to dull it – just enough. Matt had always been good at that though, she supposed.

There was a dark poetry to the sight when she stopped short at the base of her apartment stoop and turned to find him, the soft glow of the front lights just barely edging his masked face from where he stood in the building's silhouette. He had kissed her sweetly, over and over again the last time they'd shared this particular small space together and she had believed she found her first taste of happiness in a city that seemed determined to squelch it from existence – it could have been lifetimes ago now.

"It hurts to be left in the dark without answers doesn't it?" She asked with the frustrated tilt of her head, doing what she could to keep the unwarranted sense of betrayal wound safely in her chest and off her tongue, where it had been building since the day she'd walked into his apartment to find a strange, gorgeous woman in his bed. A resigned sigh fell from her. "What do you want me to say Matt?"

Karen could feel his attention on her, heavy like stone, though he faced the street.

"I guess I just want to know that you're okay…"

It was sincere as always and did something to chip away at her already cracked composure. She couldn't stop the icy breath that hissed its way out in a bitter laugh.

"Why now and not a few weeks ago when we needed you in court?" Her brow lifted. "When we were doing everything we could to win the biggest case of _your_ career… Or what about when I was helping _your_ best friend after he got shot to shit, huh? Where exactly were you then?"

His head dipped for a moment and a pair of horns caught the light.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you…"

And that shattered her into a million sharp edges.

"That's just it!" She snapped, her heels tossed recklessly onto the ground. "You never give me a chance to believe you – or a reason to for that matter. Trust is earned Matt, and this," she pushed her finger out from the front of Frank's jacket and drew it up the length of him. "This is not the way to do it. I'm not your client anymore. You don't have to protect me from this shit…" Her shoulders fell as she took a steadying breath. "You were just supposed to be there for me while I dealt with it…"

He shifted uneasily in the night, the entirety of him seeming unsure of whether to draw closer or away.

"I was always there if you needed me."

"Yeah, just a call away right? Just like for Foggy?" She returned, knowing every bit how bitter she sounded, but she could repeat the answering message of his voicemail by heart and for weeks it had been the only way she or Foggy could hear his voice. A troubling thought nearly knocked the poison and air from her completely. "Does he know?"

Matt went silent, deciding to take the step that would press his back against the bricked building. His head tilted wearily toward the black sky and Karen knew the answer before he spoke it. Her stomach churned.

"How long?" She asked low, breaking the silence, hot tears forming at the corners of her eyes.

"A while now," he murmured finally. "…Karen I owe you an apology that I could never…"

"I don't want anything from you Matt," she breathed, facing away from him to hide her injured expression and retrieve her shoes. Discomfort contorted her features as she struggled to bend forward. "Not anymore. Not your lies, or bullshit…" Sharp eyes stopped him at the edge of the shadows. "And especially not your help."

She had just made her way up the concrete stairs and slipped her key into the front door.

"It's Frank, isn't it?" He asked from somewhere beneath her, and the flat question curled in her core and froze her cold - the same sensation that would arise every time she'd silently asked herself the same thing.

Rounded eyes peered down over the banister. "What?"

"I'm blind, not neglectful, Karen." He said, soft as the night. "He's all over you."

Karen cocked her head at him like he was truly as insane as Frank had called him out for being.

"What the hell does that even mean?" She asked defensively.

"I hear things. I know what he's been up to." Matt nodded toward her. "And I know that's his long coat you're holding around you so tightly… He's been helping you, hasn't he?"

It was a statement more than a question and she found herself taking a step back from it, finding a sense of comfort in her body being hidden from the glinting red eyes of his mask behind the railing. A part of her wondered if he was even really blind or if he had lied about that too.

"I don't see how that's any of your business."

"His actions make it my business, Karen," he returned fast. "He's not a safe man to be around."

She gave a humorless laugh at that, recalling the multitude of times she'd argued the same notion with the man himself, using both her fevered words and accidental recklessness to successfully prove him wrong every time. Matt always decided to give a shit when it was far too late.

"And you are?"

"He lives by different rules…" He pressed. "Acts on different morals – or lack thereof."

"You mean he kills people." Karen said bluntly, where he wouldn't. They'd shared this dance before.

"And you seriously don't find anything wrong with that still?" He returned harsher, a dash of disgust weighing on his voice, reminding her of their last 'date' at his apartment and making it known that he recalled it just as clearly. "You saw what he did to those two men back there Karen."

So the Devil of Hell's Kitchen had a superiority complex. What a great headline that would make. Frank's frustration with him back at the warehouse had been a puzzle to her at the time, but now with every sentence this infuriatingly judgmental side of Matt spoke, another piece fell into place.

"Yes, I did," she nodded tightly, a new sort of heat burning away the moisture from her eyes. "But you didn't see what they were about to do to _me,_ Matt." She drew every wisp of the flame within her to her tongue so he could get a taste of it too. Her jaw clenched hard. "And you don't know a goddamn thing about Frank Castle."

She turned her back to him, jerking the front door unlocked with the sharp twist of her key and shutting it hard behind her.

* * *

It was supposed to feel better once she was alone in her apartment.

The dirt of the day shouldn't have been able to reach her this high up, hidden behind the protection of locks, and brick and mortar, and drawn windows. They'd been fixed somehow, but she barely had time to fixate on it before she was shedding the layers of her clothing, hanging Frank's jacket on the hook by her door and ripping open the remaining two buttons that had desperately attempted to hold her ruined blouse closed at her navel.

Her reflection stared back at her, jaded in the bathroom mirror. She looked like shit, a thick layer of grime etching her face that never really seemed to come off for long no matter how often she bathed and fresh blood staining the closures over the knot at her temple. Red on white. She blinked her eyes away.

The scalding hot water burned at first but she held still beneath it, letting it wash down her hair and back for a long time before she eased her arms against herself to let it rinse the blood from her wrists with labored breaths – and holy _shit_ it stung, like burning thorns dragged against the screaming skin.

The curse on her lips morphed slowly into a bone shaking laugh. One that sounded mental to her ears and chilled her as she lost herself in the steam.

This wasn't her; the easy going girl from Vermont who found solace in her family and rolling, green hills. Losing one meant having to abandon the other and she would swear right then that her sanity had been left behind somewhere along the way, lost somewhere in the unfamiliar city streets that she had once sought out for refuge.

There was nothing of the sort to be found here. Just more and more lies, and cold steel, and conscious-less animals ready to defile anything they could sink their claws into.

She could still feel their touch on her skin – her neck, chest, shoulder – as tired arms gave every last bit of energy they had to scrub the sensation away. Silent tears fell now, colliding with the droplets of water that sat heavy on her lashes and trailing as one down her face.

There was no fight left to give. Nothing to stop the void in her chest from breaking and spilling through her like molten lead.

And for a long while, she let go, allowing it to flow freely from her and mingle with the tinted pool of water at her feet.

* * *

Frank had recognized those shitbags the moment he spotted them. They were Fisk's. He'd seen their pictures stamped in the corner of numerous case files and was well enough aware that Karen was not their first victim – and would _not_ have been their last. So now the sick fucks wouldn't be able to put their hands on another woman ever again.

He only came down from the rooftop after she had let herself inside, giving him enough time to patch himself up and set his lookout point. If Fisk's influence was growing beyond the walls of the prison, the failed hit on her tonight would not be the last, leaving him the the immeasurable task of figuring out why and keeping Red out of his goddamn way-

But she was doing part of the work for him.

Overhearing their conversation below hadn't been his main objective, but it ensnared him like a vice.

A certain degree of moroseness reached his ears, coming in almost equal amounts from the pair, but taking different forms as he pushed her to the point of no return. Frank had been right about that too – she really loved him. But something changed when she snapped, voice dripping with so much ire that Frank's brow rose with it, and he nearly risked a glance over the edge to be sure they weren't about to start swinging.

She was something else entirely after that, her words slipping through her teeth and fusing with his own name as he was thrown up in the mess, and it struck him hard – the way her voice grated beneath the weight of her defense, too familiar for comfort.

After she was safely inside, he tucked his rifle against him and descended to her fire escape, telling himself it was more to appraise the window repair men's work than anything else – which he had paid them very well to do right, and it seemed like they had, minus the phone call that he was almost certain she wouldn't have been able to answer, regardless. It would take some serious firepower to shatter them now.

His more legitimate suspicions were confirmed as he sat with his back pressed against the wall, the chill of it reaching him through his vest and shirt, and he swore he could feel her despair shaking through brick with each of her drawn cries – ones that he knew had been building within her from the moment he'd found her bound and displayed.

The sudden need to move was almost startling in its unyielding grip on him – to do something, _anything_ – but he could not be what she needed right now, not from his distance, so he only bowed his head and shared her suffering.

* * *

It had gone silent for a long while, the hum from the pipes in the wall fading as water slowly came to rest. The night was a cold one but Frank paid it no mind. Instead he listened to the occasional whine of a kitchen cabinet being opened or the pat of soft steps against wood, but the sounds of the restless city would've drowned them out to the distracted ear.

It had to have been why he missed the sound of her moving across the room, the sudden slide of the window at his left leaving his hands tight around the gun in his lap. When her head peered out, damp hair tumbling over the shoulders of a thick, white bathrobe, his fingers fell loose against it and the faint look of contentedness that touched her eyes when they found him through the dark was something that he decided would never sit quite right in his gut.

Karen ducked out the window and Frank watched fixedly as her bare feet stepped gingerly across the icy steel. Without missing a beat, she eased herself down the wall to sit at his side, the fresh smell of her floral soaps catching in the breeze and drifting all around him. It was her mission, it seemed, to throw him a curve ball like this every time he thought he had her pinned and faithfully believing he'd be there to catch it.

He would never let himself be so arrogant as to feel it had somehow been earned.

"How'd you know I was out here?"

His eyes flicked downward toward the motion of her crisscrossing her legs and tucking her toes beneath them, the long robe sheathing her like an ashen gown. It left their knees touching and the warmth there lingered.

"I didn't," she admitted softly with the small lift of her good shoulder. Her fingers fidgeted in her lap. "I just hoped you would be."

It drew his eyes to hers and he had never seen them so swollen, the deep shadows beneath them nearly matching his waning bruises.

"It's cold tonight. You should go get some sleep." He said, doing everything he could to put conviction behind the request – but it was just that.

Karen's eyes traded his for the skyline.

"You're one to talk." The retort came from her sounding as weary as she looked, but lacked any real frustration. She shifted the smallest fraction closer, her shoulder brushing against him as she used his steady form to relieve some of the pressure from her own. "It's bad for your health y'know, sleep deprivation."

His low scoff rumbled through them both. On any other night he would have called her on her piss poor diversion.

"You're frustrating as hell, you know that?" He sent back with the draw of his brow and it was her turn to rock them with soft laughter.

He couldn't help but glance tight lipped at the phenomenon of such a thing, given the shitty circumstances she always found herself in. There was a strength to her that he would never know for himself, that knew no bounds, the way she walked in and out of haunting situations as if she were the one to be afraid of.

But even so, they were always determined to leave their mark on her, the sight of her skin when she raised a hand to tuck her hair behind her ears effortlessly snapping him back to where they sat.

"Let me see your wrists."

She complied almost too easily, holding her hands up before her so that wide sleeves fell to bunch at the creases in her elbows. The wounds had been washed thoroughly, shown plainly enough by the sheer angriness of the area. He set his gun down along his legs and pulled the last of his roll of bandages from his pants pocket, angling himself toward her and doing what he could to ignore the sensation of her soft hand over his as he wrapped each of her wrists and bound them with just enough pressure to stop the bleeding – just as he'd done a thousand times before.

"Thank you," Karen whispered, looking more at the skull on his chest than at him, as his fingers were tying off the final knot.

It wasn't the first time she had thanked him. Nothing new. But this time she was in his hands. Too close. Smelt too good to him, like a breath of fresh air free from the god-awful smelling city. Breathtaking in the sharp edges of her brokenness.

He released her, shifting back a safe distance against the rails opposite her.

"Don't thank me yet ma'am. I need you to tell me something first."

Frank watched her frame grow tense.

"Is that why you're here?" She asked him carefully. "What is it, Frank?"

"Fisk." He said the name and gauged her reaction to it, watching as it turned soft shivers from the cold into full on trembles. She wrapped her arms tight around her and swallowed. "Why does he want you dead?"

A heavy silence hung in the air, leaving her rigid as the steel beneath them by the time he broke it again.

"I'm giving you a chance to tell me before I find out in ways you're not gonna like."

Her attention snapped on him like a spotlight.

"You wouldn't…"

"I damn sure will. Whatever Fisk knows, I can too. Won't be all that difficult either." Frank held his ground and her poignant gaze as she so clearly tried to decide whether or not to believe him. It reminded him of a small diner and the widening of blue eyes at the mention of guns over coffee. He was barking up the right tree. "But I owe you a chance to be honest with me first. This is it." He was direct with her where he would not be with himself. This was nothing more than a drop of water in an angry sea and he was excruciatingly aware that he could never fully repay her for what she'd lost in his name. He would start by keeping her alive.

"I…" She hesitated, her eyes falling to her lap. Whatever she'd done, it ate at her still. He could see so in the sickness of her expression and paling of her skin. "If I talk about it, it makes it real Frank. And I-I can't…" Her words were cut off by her hand rising to cover her mouth. He knew this look.

"Were you protecting yourself?"

Her face crumpled before him. She nodded soundlessly into her hand.

And for a short moment he could only rap his finger against the barrel of his gun while he watched her fight her demons, her eyes drawing shut tightly as she struggled to hold them in and not fold forward. The words he knew he should say refused come to him, his ability to scare the monsters away disappearing from his grasp just as quickly as he'd become one.

"Then they deserved it," he finally spoke soft, and it was all he could give her because it was all he believed. "Whatever was done to you would've been done to someone else and they might not have had the brass to walk away from it alive."

Her eyes opened, tearless and timid on him and he'd seen this before too. "You bastard," she sent through the space between her fingers, and it was a desperate attempt to smother the fact that she knew he was right.

"Now that's more like it." He met her gaze in earnest until the tension slowly made its way from her shoulders and she uncoiled, letting her hand fall to her lap. His eyes followed it before they lifted back hers. "I don't know what kind of trouble is comin' yet, but it's best to be ready for anything." Her .380 was warm in his hand when he pulled it from the back of his belt. He held the safe end out to her. "One of those assholes tried to pull it on me. Keep it on you. Not in your purse. They go for that first every time."

Karen hesitated before she took it from him, lips parted, her hand hovering inches from the grip.

"After what you've just learned – you give me my gun back like…"

Frank pressed it into her hand.

"Changes nothin'. I've seen the way you hold this thing." He couldn't stop the lift of his lip. "Practice makes perfect ma'am."

His words had been the right ones for once and he watched as they released her from some sort of internal chains. Something in him lightened with it as she rolled the weapon over deliberately in her hands for a moment, until her gaze shifted between it and her wrapped wrist. She went cold as ice before his eyes.

"I get it now." She trailed the pad of her thumb across the hammer of the gun before she looked up at him, a dozen emotions flickering across her face before stopping at unquestionably stoic. "I need you to know that."

The silence between her borrowed words spoke volumes and he grasped her meaning almost immediately – and _fuck_ did it hurt to watch something so beautifully pure in intention become so irreversibly corrupted by necessity. She had put herself on the line for him to not lose a similar fight the night before, only to be forced over to his side of it a single goddamn day later.

He could only nod back at her, his mind already devising a plan to give this defiling city the proper cleaning it so desperately deserved.


	5. Her Penance

There was something about the Christmas lights hung around the office that kept distracting her from her work, due in a dwindling couple of hours in Ellison's inbox. She had never been one to procrastinate – not even in school, on the most boring, benign book reports, but something about this particular task still felt insurmountable.

This time of year was already off-putting, painful, and it was right now more than ever that the city of Hell's Kitchen needed a glimpse into exactly who it was that fought its' battles – but there was a blurring line between them and herself now. A gaping grey area that she had fallen into and could not accurately retrace for others to see because the details that it bore were not all hers to share.

A reporter bound by her research. Just her luck.

It wasn't reaching the two-thousand word count that still stuck her fingers heavy to the keys, it was knowing when to stop. What to share with the public and what was absolutely, indefinitely, _only_ hers. How was she supposed to tell the city that its idols were so flawed – damaged to the point of vigilantism in their search for self-repair? What could she say of the hearts behind the actions without coming across as defensive and objective as she felt?

She couldn't help but think how much easier it would be with a little insight from the parties in question, but she couldn't make herself answer Matt's phone calls just yet and Frank had disappeared for the better part of two weeks, vanishing from her fire escape before she could return to the window to pass him his jacket back. It still hung from the hook by her front door, a silent, sentient guardian and the only sign that he had ever been there that night or any number before.

Still, he was all around her.

Each morning after, she would walk into her office to a new case file on her desk, stuffed with pictures that would have once made her lose her breakfast. A well dressed Wall Street type strung up by his own tie, two men found contorted in a back alley only a few blocks away from her apartment, a lone assailant found beaten to a lifeless pulp too close to her favorite little coffee shop to be coincidence – varying degrees of punishment for their intended sins and ones of the past that were now left up to her to uncover. The grimier men with foul secrets were usually unrecognizable, their faces split in various places and splattered in red. The proud ones that knew too much were put down quicker, mercilessly, a single shot to the head or chest depending on what mood their spilled information left him in.

It helped her in her search, giving her a starting point and leading her to easily link their names to multiple heinous crimes each and every time. Linking them to everything but Fisk it seemed.

Yet Karen would not confirm their killer, not to Ellison or anyone else – would not speak the words that he probed her for each time he walked into her office with a new file and wary look on his brow. Instead she would scrunch her own at the information inside them as if they truly stirred the disgust they should in her and distract herself with the work of an average reporter. One that had to start from the bottom of her research and work her way up. Not one that had come to intimately understand that which she studied and had to actively fight back against thinking about too often – _worrying_ about.

To the city, Frank was a dead man and it would have him no other way.

The dreadful memory still snaked through Karen whenever she was reminded of it, the heat from the blaze thickening the night air, dead bodies scattered along the dock, the morning sun rising over head and helping her to scan each of the faces that were pulled from the flames, all while silently praying to whoever listened that she wouldn't recognize any of them.

It was the first time she would attempt to determine what he was to her. What it was about him that twisted in her rib cage so tightly when she believed him dead.

But he had somehow made it through the fires of hell a second time.

Her eyes fell from her computer screen to the pale bruises around her wrists. It was oddly comforting to know she had not been the only one to face the unforgiving wrath of Hell's Kitchen and come out a different person on the other side – a different person entirely, but still _alive_.

No, everyone who dared to call the place home was forced to feel the heat for themselves in a way that was always too personal for repair.

Phantom images flashed behind her eyes then. Devils and death. Horns and skulls. Red and white.

And before she realized it, her story was pouring from a few shared hells onto paper.

* * *

Karen held the newspaper between her gloved hands, passing the older woman in the small news stand a five dollar bill before waving off the change and moving quickly down the sidewalk. Her eyes scanned along every word of her article a full three times before she made it through the door of her apartment, searching for mistakes and arranging the words a different way in her mind each time to be sure she chose the best ones.

It wasn't the first article she had ever had published. There were a few before it, petty crime and street gossip, but this one was so much more than a fluff piece. It was recognition. An apology.

Acceptance.

She glanced up at the dark jacket that sat heavy on her coat hook as she shrugged off her own and hung it beside it.

Hopefully he would feel something similar should he ever read it himself.

* * *

Days bled into night unnoticed, each one of them spent searching the streets for any sign of useful information in ways that left his knuckles raw and burning.

This, though, felt like a fresh bruised rib.

There had always been that too familiar expression etched within the mask she tried, weary and threadbare beneath taciturn smiles. And why the fuck was that all he could think about right now with bloodshot eyes and much bigger threats at play?

Frank's hands stained the damp newspaper in the dim lamp light, his fingers clutching as he read.

He couldn't help the small glimpses into her past he'd gotten from the very first time he met her eyes, too blue and close at his bedside in that dreary hospital room. Over the months since then, he had involuntarily picked up bits of it in her habits. The security found in the handbag she clutched tight beneath her arm. How she would flinch at the smallest sounds, or check over her shoulder every handful of steps, even while treading the city streets in the light of day. And although it was so long ago now, he still felt the pang of guilt every once in a while for uncovering, much too easily, the fact that she had surrendered her driver's license just before trading in Vermont for her current address.

He would never ask to have the blanks filled in without reason. And damn good reason at that. But as he took in the first few lines of her latest news article, another piece fell into place.

 _Look into your own eyes and_  
 _tell me you are not heroic,_  
 _that you have not endured,_  
 _or suffered, or lost the things_  
 _you care about most_

The words stilled him where he stood for a divine moment. Body and mind. Never really since the day that took his life from him had he been one to chase the light or want it anywhere near him, but now that it was there behind his eyes, he knew he should be clawing at it. Gasping for it. Needing it.

Frank set the news article on top of the growing pile at his bedside, trading it all for his rifle instead.

* * *

Christmas struck like the flu. She had gotten used to spending them alone, the feeling one that she had learned to live cordially with instead of letting it drive her mad.

This year though, she would spend the evening in the elegantly decorated ball room of Foggy's new law firm, feeling underdressed as ever, though she had spent most of the week since she'd gotten the invitation picking out an outfit all the way down to the toenail polish that impeccably matched her heels.

The high ceiling bellowed over them, holding on to the music and rolling it around them loud enough to make talking a strain. Other employees and their guests with too much alcohol in their system flooded the dance floor, their tired eyes and fake laughs leaving her feeling envious of their ease.

Foggy sat across from her at the small round table, looking nervous but patient as ever.

Karen took another long sip from her champagne flute before trying a smile at him.

"This is nice. I needed this."

Some of the tension left Foggy's face and he held his glass out between them to clank it with hers.

"I couldn't agree more," he replied in that tone that let her know Matt had beaten her to him.

He would start first, but it wouldn't take him long to get her to vent about it. She would find herself leaving out the bits on what led her to discover his identity and who it was that kept her alive long enough to do so, another abyss of grey area that was not hers to color in.

The alcohol had to be to blame when the silence began to stretch on longer and longer and he finally convinced her to join him and Marci on the dance floor. And though warmth filled her belly and a smile curved her lips at Foggy gyrating in circles before her, she never felt so alone.

* * *

Resolutions weren't happening this year.

She had made a few the year before, ones that were meant to bring her life back from the precipice and into the realm of something normal. Not too long after, her coworker would be murdered and left bleeding at her feet, and she'd be framed for it.

No, this one she would be spending alone on her fire escape, wrapped tight in her comforter, a warm mug of coffee between her fingers, listening to the symphony of voices cheering and echoing over the buildings from Times Square as they counted down the remaining seconds of the year.

When the display of fireworks scattered across the sky, brightly announcing both end and new beginnings, her first instinct was to let her eyes close, finding solace instead in the way the sound of angry gunpowder shook straight through her chest into the wall behind her and awoke every nerve along her skin.

Karen had felt something similar the last time she had sat there, with all the warmth that was Frank at her side. And although she hadn't seen him in the months since, she had to believe he was never too far gone. She could feel it when she walked home from work late at night, unable to stop herself from glancing along the rooftops. How occasionally when she would go out to get her coffee in the morning after a particularly rough night of research, it would already be paid for. The peace she found in not having to check over her own shoulder every waking moment.

Something had changed that night though, and his distance after stifled out any last small fractions of doubt. There was so much more to Frank Castle than the world cared to know. So much of him that he believed to no longer exist.

So much left to hope for, that when she let her eyes slide open they strayed to the shadows instead of the sky. If he really was out there watching over her, she would return the favor.

* * *

If it wasn't important, she wouldn't be here.

Karen repeated it to herself like a broken mantra as she made her way, quiet as possible up the rickety stairs that seemed to never end, the reason for her unannounced visit tucked in a folder under her arm.

Her false bravado left her when she stopped in front of the door that had to be his. Apartment 74, the only one on the hall with a shiny silver door knob, unlike the rusting gold toned ones that adorned all the others. Reinforced locks and no welcome mat. He may as well have spray painted a giant skull over the chipping green paint.

Karen took a deep breath, remembering the words she'd practiced on the way over and risked three even knocks. It sent her heart hammering in her chest for a reason she couldn't quite place and as the seconds stretched on, she fought the urge to turn and run. This was a bad idea.

For all she knew, he could have vanished from her fire escape and gotten the hell out of dodge. It would have been the most reasonable action for him to take under his circumstances, him being a _ghost_ and all… So why did the thought of it burn in her chest?

But she knew better, knew him better, and if he wasn't held up tending his wounds, he was working.

The hall whined under her heels as she made her way along it, finding the end and going up the final half dozen stairs that led to the roof access. Her hand was slick against the doorknob when she turned it, pressing it open.

A painfully cold night awaited her, even for February, its bite sinking straight through her layers, turning her fingers icy and sending her breath of something very near to relief curling like smoke in the breeze.

All she could see was the back of his head, the rest of him sheathed in a thick long-coat black enough to make him mesh with the shadows. He sat facing away from her on a small pile of cinder blocks, his hands working at something on the gun across his lap.

She shut the door securely behind her, using the small window of reprieve to gather her thoughts before making her way with careful steps toward the center of the roof. The view was one that left her feeling robbed by her rent. Frank faced Central Park, the snow-capped skeletons of trees that seemed to come right out from the edging of the building sparkling in the moonlight. To their left, the usually brackish water of the Hudson reflected back at her a cream pale yellow.

"You ever hear of a phone call?"

It rumbled from him quiet enough that he could have been talking to his weapon, but it was Frank enough to let her know that time did nothing to change the man. He would never know that only once had she tried one of the old numbers he'd used to contact her long ago only to find it disconnected, or how badly she wanted to punch him in the shoulder blade right then.

"Because that's what you do right? Call the people you need to talk to?" She measured her words, glancing over at him. At her distance, she could see that his hair had grown out a little, more even across his head, no longer the tightly faded style of a marine.

A grunt shook his shoulders, but he gave her nothing back.

When she couldn't take the quiet any longer, she closed the distance to his side, her heels keeping steady rhythm against the concrete.

"Where have you been Fr…?" She started to ask before she could see the edge of his face, but when it came into view, it stunned her still.

Deep bruises marred the bridge of his nose, bleeding purple beneath eyes that had not seen sleep for far too long, like a thick layer of war paint that never seemed to fully leave his features. A thin gash ran down his face high on his cheekbone, looking fresh and angry in the soft light. It illuminated the skull on his chest, the armor under his long coat rising and falling with his breaths. Karen counted four before she noticed the blood stain forming at the top of his thigh, trailing down from somewhere beneath his chest plate.

"…Frank," she breathed.

"You shouldn't be here," he spoke evenly, too calm, like she wasn't right beside him trying to convince the air back in her lungs, his mangled hands still steadily smoothing the oiled cloth along the barrel of his gun.

"What happened? Who did this to you?"

A part of her knew to expect it when he didn't answer her, turning instead to pull a long, thin rod out of the case at his side, hooking the rag at one end, and sweeping it into the gun. It was meant to be a distraction from whatever it was that kept his eyes from meeting hers. What she didn't anticipate was the way it left her gritting her teeth.

She took the final step that would let her face him and reached out to grab the rifle by the base of its barrel. Frank would stop her easily, one hand wrapping tight around the muzzle and the other moving quick to the opposite end of the stock. He held it still instead of pulling it away and she was close enough that he couldn't hide from her anymore.

"You're not gonna like it." He met her eyes and something about the way they flickered hesitantly dulled the frustration blooming in her belly. Words that others would have used to protect her, he used to prepare her. "I don't think it's Fisk." He finally said, his eyes moving back and forth on hers, always reading.

"What do you mean?" Karen straightened, her hand falling back to her side. "It has to be. He has the resources… the reasons. Who else could it be?"

"I don't know yet," he confessed sounding every bit as weary as he looked. "They're new. None of em' would give up Fisk. A few didn't even know who he was."

"Goddammit," she pushed her hair back from her forehead and cursed the air. "Every time we get close to keeping that monster locked up for good the trail disappears. There has to be paperwork, camera footage, _something_ to show how he's getting through to these people from inside a max security prison…"

"Hey," he called, drawing her back to him. "It doesn't work that way with these types of assholes. The right amount of money can hide just about anything." He flexed his fingers. "That's why sometimes they need something they can't put a price on." He shifted his weight to put away his cleaning tools, the struggle of it twisting his expression. "It ain't shit, but it's all I got right now. Your turn." He nodded toward the manila folder beneath her arm.

Karen exhaled slow, her attention returning to the black pool of blood that now stained the ground beside him. One of many injuries received doing the dirty work she could never ask of him. She steeled herself.

"Let me make sure you'll live long enough to hear it first."

She would swear something timid touched his eyes just then before they left hers. She took a moment to convince herself it was real after it was overtaken by something rougher and forced.

"I can take care of myself."

"Maybe," she returned unyielding, "but you look like shit and it's freezing out here."

* * *

He'd watched her make her way down the sidewalk toward his building, the line of his sight aimed just over her in case someone had made their final decision to follow. Told himself he wanted her to knock on his door and give up when he wasn't there to answer, to turn around and go home. That her distance was what kept her safe.

Maria's voice would echo in his head when he toyed with the thought too long.

 _Bullshit. You know where she's safe_.

 _Safe._ He cursed under his breath at himself when he heard Karen coming up behind him.

The idea in itself was a lie. Nowhere in the city was safe for her right now, he'd spent an exhausting few weeks learning that firsthand. And he had every intention of letting her know why…

Until she was right there looking at him. Right through him, with eyes that should have been too clear to carry the same look he would find in a mirror.

He didn't mean lie to her but she already wasn't sleeping, likely due to whatever she had uncovered in her own research and clutched against her so tightly. He would tell her what he'd learned later when he was sure – when pain and the soft scent of lilac weren't dulling his judgment.

* * *

Karen couldn't say the tiny apartment wasn't exactly what she'd expected. It was like walking into the images posted from the first time the NYPD staked out one of his safe houses, long before she knew anything about the man behind the murders. She would have to blink away the memories of the countless victims' pictures she would go through after that in search of the truth.

Instead, she focused on how the chaos was so distinctly organized around her. Bullets covered the surface of a small desk under a blacked out window, in perfect lines of sorted size and caliber. Cans of food were meticulously stacked along the small kitchenette counter, each of their labels facing forward. Even his small cot was turned down without a single wrinkle, more likely due to him never actually using it than out of habit.

Frank's free hand braced against the door frame as he limped in behind her, dark eyes following her when she turned to take the weight of his gun for him, having to hold it with two hands to prop it up against the wall behind the door.

It would catch him off guard when she moved back around it to help him pull his coat off his shoulders and duck under his arm to take some of the burden off his injured side. Sure fingers wrapped into the material over his ribs and he couldn't remember the last time someone touched him there without leaving a mark.

"This alright?" She asked.

He couldn't decide if it was in reference to his pain or if she was asking his permission. Not like it had ever been essential to her before.

"Yeah," was all he answered with because he couldn't deny the support was nice. Foreign.

Springs whined beneath his weight as he eased down onto the cot, Karen's hand remaining on his shoulder until she was sure he was steady. Her eyes were all business now, reminding him of the way she had once tore mercilessly though old case files with him in an interrogation room.

"First aid kit?"

"Bathroom," he pointed her in the right direction.

"Don't move."

It was a soft but pointed order, given to him in the way only she could. He couldn't think of the last time someone had the guts to give him one outside of court rooms and prison walls, but this was one he had no intention of disobeying.

For the time being, she was in his sight. She was here where no one would lay a hand on her. And he couldn't deny feeling as bad as she claimed he looked.

By the time Karen returned to the room, Frank's shirt was thrown over the back of the desk chair, his fingers working at the clasps on the side of his vest. The awkward twist of his torso edged pain on his face.

"Here, let me."

Karen set the first aid kit on the bed beside him and shifted the chair so that she sat in front of him, first quickly slipping free the clasps at his right, then more carefully over his damaged side. She helped him tug his vest up and over his head, repeating the motion with his blood soaked undershirt, holding the back away from his hair and face as he ducked out of it.

Frank groaned when he straightened and it was the first time her eyes had seen the bare skin of his torso and the galaxy of marks and scars that dotted it. The center of his defined chest just beneath his throat was a deep red exploding into lighter purples and yellows as it traveled the distance across to either of his shoulders. Thin scars marred his sides like a tally, some still raw with fresh stitches and one seeping just beside his navel where they had torn.

She tried not to swear but it slipped past her lips anyway in an attempt to make sense of what she felt at the sight of him like this.

His fingers pushed against the muscle just above where he bled while he studied it.

"Not as deep as it looks."

But something else had grabbed her attention and she couldn't stop herself from reaching out toward the angry spot on his left shoulder, perfectly round and black against his russet skin. Her heart raced, but her hand stayed steady and he stilled under the soft exploration of her finger tips.

It was freshly healed over; rough, calloused skin taking the place of the softer flesh that surrounded it. Barely a month old.

There was no denying that she knew what Frank was up to when he would disappear, even if he did his best to hide the worst of it from her. But now, she couldn't help but feel responsible for each of the new wounds that painted his skin. This thing between them – whatever it was, she may never be certain of what to label it, but if there was one thing she would bet her life on without question, it was that Frank Castle would do everything in his power to ensure she kept it.

She would never be so selfish as to feel it was somehow deserved.

"I'm so sorry Frank."

And she was. For so much more than she had any control over. She was sorry for the frenzied, insatiable drive in him created by the cluster of seconds that devoured Frank Castle the man and spit out the Punisher. Sorry that it chased him from his warm bed every night to the unforgiving city streets in search of a penance that would always be just beyond his reach and the barrel of his gun. Sorry that if either of their hearts still sat properly in their chests, she could imagine herself falling in love with a man like him. Settling down with him somewhere far away from the endless concrete and grime.

But he would never leave, and she would never go back.

"I read your article," he said a moment later, his gravelly voice cutting through the silence and she realized then how much she'd missed it. He nodded his head toward the night stand and in the dim light, she could just make out the small pile of newspaper clippings, stacked neatly in the corner a few inches high. Her hand slipped away from his skin as she stared at them. "What you do is important Page, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let some selfish prick take that away."

Karen couldn't help but to wonder how he always knew what to say to get the reaction he wanted from her, be it disgust, or mind-numbing frustration, or this feeling that begged her to smile at a shirtless serial murderer. Maybe this is how he would say _'I love you'_ if the emotion still had room in him to grow.

She pushed her hair back from her face and cleared her throat.

"I just wanted you to know that I'm here whenever you need me. You don't have to hide from me Frank."

He surprised her with a breathy grunt. "Yeah, cause that sure as shit failed miserably."

Her eyes met his and she couldn't stop the curve of her lip at the glint of amusement she found there.

"I'm serious," she blinked, shifting forward and her expression sobered. "You can't disappear like that again. Not without telling me."

Something in her words left him warring with himself, tightening eyes that went back and forth between her and the space behind her. Of course he would read between her words that this is how she would return his affection if it could ever rightfully belong to her.

"This is not a good idea."

"I know," she breathed, reaching out slow to still his restless hands between hers. "But it's all I ask."

The sigh that came from him was drawn and submissive. Unsure.

She could feel the tense restraint in his hands when they carefully turned down around hers, his fingers testing her skin, and couldn't remember a time when she felt braver. _Safer_.

"Yes ma'am."

Frank's eyes would fall from hers and linger on where they touched for a long moment before growing distant. He released her, easing his legs up onto the bed and lying down.

Karen knew not to push him any farther, instead using it as her cue to fix his broken stitches and clean up what she could of blood stained skin.

The new lead she found could wait until tomorrow. The rest of the night would be spent on silent repentance and some much needed sleep.


End file.
